British 'terror sponsors' held in Hungary

Two British nationals banned from travelling abroad after serving jail terms for financing terrorism have been apprehended in Hungary on a train heading for Romania, Hungarian police said Wednesday.

Hungarian daily Blikk named one of them as Trevor Brooks, also known as Abu Izzadeen, a Muslim activist jailed in Britain in 2008 for fundraising for terrorists and inciting terrorism abroad.

The 44-year-old and the other man, named by Hungarian authorities as Simon Jonathan K., 40, were intercepted on Saturday on an international train at Lokoshaza, a crossing point on the Romanian border.

According to a Hungarian police statement, the pair each served two jail terms totalling five years in Britain.

After their release in 2009, both were barred from leaving Britain without permission.

The two men were taken into custody by Hungarian police because they did not have legal documents entitling them to stay in the EU member state. One of them presented a British driving licence and the other just a Koran.

Only after their detention did it emerge that both were subject to a European arrest warrant, police spokeswoman Viktoria Csiszer-Kovacs told AFP.

"The men will appear shortly at a court in Budapest to decide on the extradition," Csiszer-Kovacs said.

She added that it was unclear what their intended final destination had been, although it was possible they were on their way to Syria via Bulgaria and Turkey.

There was no suggestion that the men were implicated in Friday's deadly attacks in Paris.

Izzadeen was born to a Christian Jamaican family in London and worked as an electrician. He won notoriety in 2006 for heckling Britain's then-home secretary John Reid live on television.

He came to prominence for refusing to condemn the July 2005 bombings in London and describing then-prime minister Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush as the "real terrorists" for invading Iraq and Afghanistan.